


Cicatrix (Kintsukuroi)

by raendown



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, M/M, minor description of violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-26
Updated: 2019-07-26
Packaged: 2020-07-20 06:33:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,514
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19987690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raendown/pseuds/raendown
Summary: Cicatrix [sik-uh-triks]Noun.New tissue that forms over a wound and later contracts into a scar.KintsukuroiThe art of beautiful scars.A Japanese art using precious metals to repair broken pottery, creating something that is more beautiful for having been broken.





	Cicatrix (Kintsukuroi)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [A_Boy_Named_Mike](https://archiveofourown.org/users/A_Boy_Named_Mike/gifts).



> Happy birthday to someone who deserves all of the world's kindnesses.

It’s deep in the heart of summer and the dust is so heavy in the air it nearly coats his tongue with every panting breath but Tobirama can’t find it in him to care, can’t slow his breathing enough to close his mouth and doesn’t want to. He bends his spine to curl tighter against Madara's body and presses his face against the thick man of hair that first caught his attention so long ago. After all the years of confusion and flirting and mind games he has the man right where he wants him at last.

Pressed up against the wall of this too-warm bedroom, gasping for air and praying to a god who probably can’t hear him. A roll of his hips brings another round of vicious prayers from Madara's lips and Tobirama grins as he pulls back to slam their mouths together. Nothing has ever made his blood boil quite like Madara biting at his lips, fierce even when he is cornered, fire and heat and attitude all crushed together inside a body of only average height. Tobirama wants to stay here like this forever, wants to remember for the rest of his life what it feels like to press so close he can almost feel their hearts crashing together through their ribs.

Tongues slide against each other like the leather sliding through Madara's belt loops, a slow glide no matter how the man begs him to hurry the hell up. He’s waited long enough to have this that Tobirama thinks he should be allowed to take all the time he wants to enjoy it, to burn every moment of this in to his memory.

He wants to remember the way humidity makes the edges of Madara's hair curl and stick to his skin. Wants to remember the taste of dust and salt and the burn of dollar store cologne in his nose. He wants to lie awake at night and remember the feeling of blunt nails pressing in to the tops of his shoulders and dragging down the backs of his arms only to pause and loosen when he tilts his head to nip at already abused lips. Surely this is paradise, messy and uncoordinated, rough and glorious and closer to heaven than he has ever climbed before.

Getting Madara out of his shirt is a fight, cotton tangling with hair while the man stubbornly keeps his back to the wall and refuses all offers to help untangle him. Tobirama amuses himself instead by attacking the chest bare and undefended before him while Madara struggles to free his arms. The flush on his partner’s cheeks when they finally come in to view again has nothing on the color they gain when he goes for the button on too-tight pants.

It’s not the first time they’ve kissed, hardly the first time they both understood the tension between them would explode someway or somehow, but it’s the first time Tobirama had seen all this skin laid out for him like a map, every inch a new and valuable treasure just waiting to be discovered. He tastes and touches as though this will be their last time. Movements frantic and hearts beating wild, they writhe against the wall of the same bedroom Madara has lived in since high school. So many times in the past Tobirama has dreamed of this moment happening here in this place and now that the moment is his he wants to capture it in his teeth and never let go, to hold it there where the words he wants to say lie stagnant on his tongue, things he can’t bear to let out until he knows it is safe.

Until he knows Madara feels the same and this isn’t a flashfire, burning bright and hot and sudden only to sputter out just as quickly as it lit.

As bare on his skin as he is in his heart, Tobirama drags his fingers up the line of Madara's cock and devours the sight of the man shuddering at his touch. Presses them hard against the wall just because he can. Then pulls away and spins Madara to press him against the wall again so he can rut in to the cleft of that glorious ass. Hands settle on hips to stop them from bucking against him as he bends his neck to nose at the hair spilling down Madara's back.

He nearly loses his teeth when Madara panics and tries to head butt him.

“Shit, Mads, what the fuck?”

“Don’t touch that! Don’t touch it!” There’s an edge in his voice that Tobirama has never heard before and it makes him step back.

Gasping for breath looks a lot less sexy when it pairs with wild eyes and the expression of an animal expecting the trap to close on them at any moment. Madara huddles his side to the wall as if cowering away, breaking Tobirama’s heart with one look.

“Hey, whoa, it’s fine. I’m over here now. Tell me what’s wrong.”

“Stop touching my neck!” Madara shrieks.

“No one is touching anything if you don’t want me to.” Tobirama pauses and his eyes zero in on the space between his partner’s shoulder blades. He’s never seen Madara's back before. It’s never really occurred to him as strange with all that hair in the way but now that he thinks about it he’s never seen the man wear his hair up or pulled back in any way, always free falling and covering him like a veil of secrets.

Keeping his hands down and his stance non-threatening, he moves to the side until he stands square in Madara's field of view and then keeps himself as still as possible.

It feels like it takes a hundred years for his partner to stop heaving for breath as though he’s running out of air and the wild, haunted look in his eyes doesn’t ever fully go away but Tobirama forces himself to stay patient and murmurs soothing nonsense until he feels it’s probably safe to ask a question or two. A quick glance at the clock tells him that eternity lasted only for about five minutes. He has trouble believing that. It can’t have been only five minutes ago he was writhing and excited and ready to finally come together the way he’s been dreaming about for ages.

They’re both entirely naked still but the awkwardness is in Madara's stance, prey cringing away from an imagined predator.

“Can you tell me what’s wrong?” he asks and hates to see his partner flinch.

“I don’t like anyone touching my neck.” A flat statement. Empty tone. Information with no inflection from a man who usually brims with just as many emotions as his best friend, though he doesn’t express them quite like Hashirama does.

Phrasing his question tactfully should probably occur to Tobirama but he’s startled enough by a revelation he’s never seen any hint of that all he says is, “Why?”

The silence between them in heavy on his tongue, weighs in his chest like lead. Tobirama watches his partner struggle with the words choking his throat and realizes that it hurts – _aches_ – to see him in pain, especially so when he cannot see the source of it. With careful movements he inches his way forward and reaches out, relieved more than words can express when Madara does not pull away, stepping forward until he can draw the man in to his arms and hold tight, making sure not to disturb his hair.

His answer is a long time in coming but he waits. Tobirama has the patience of an oak and he will spread his roots for Madara and stand here until time batters him back down to the earth if that’s what he needs to do.

“We were pretty young,” Madara begins, turning his face away and speaking to the wall. “Izuna screamed a lot and the guy – we got mugged. He had a gun. And some wire. I remember the way he looked at Izuna, like he wanted the noise to stop and he didn’t care how. We were just kids. I thought it was a good idea; I just started making more noise than Izuna so he would pay attention to me instead.”

“A brave thing for a child to do,” Tobirama tells him.

“Stupid! I didn’t know for sure he was going to do anything to Izuna but then of course I start shouting my head off and he–” The words cut off abruptly, like a knife shaving the syllables away before they’re finished.

Long moments pass before Madara reaches for the mass of hair behind him and very carefully pulls it forward over one shoulder. His eyes stare determinedly at the wall. Tobirama hates it so much he almost doesn’t look to see what has been revealed but when he does his blood runs cold. Runs hot. Rushing through his veins like the high octane races his youngest sibling loves to watch, circling and circling, forever only moments away from certain disaster. Rage fills him until he feels as though he must be swollen with it and yet he cannot speak a single word.

The scar is thick and long across the back of his neck, a cord of stretched out pink tissue that will never quite fade to the same color as the rest of his skin. One look at it is all he needs to know that the mark is old but also that whatever caused it must have taken a great deal of pain.

Madara's words are halting when they come and Tobirama drinks every syllable in like a draught of calm, taking comfort in the familiar rhythms of the man’s speech and feeling guilty for it. He isn’t the one who should need comfort right now.

“It went all the way around. My mother wouldn’t let me see any of the pictures from the crime scene even when I got older. He didn’t really know how to choke someone and he kept releasing me just before I passed out and then – and then trying again. Izuna ran away to get help but he’d already started hurting me and I think in the trial he said that he thought leaving me alive would make it worse somehow.” Madara breathes deeply, each word more distant than the last. “I’m told they grafted skin on to the front of my neck, a big swatch from my lower leg, but there was a complication with the surgery and they never had a chance to do the same for the rest. After that we just could never afford to go back for something the doctors said was just cosmetic.”

“Mads…”

“It’s fine. I just don’t like anything touching the back of my neck, okay?”

“That is anything but fine,” Tobirama says. Everything in him wants to take away the pain he can see so clearly stamped across that beloved face.

Huffing indignantly, Madara finally meets his eyes again. “Just don’t touch the scar, okay?”

“You can trust me on that.” Solemn words for a heartfelt promise.

Uncomfortable, unhappy to have the darkest part of him exposed so unexpectedly, Madara sighs and drops his head against the strong shoulder waiting for him. Tobirama is only too happy to let him. He folds the man even tighter in to his embrace and closes his eyes with a silent vow that nothing will ever happen to his partner ever again, that he will fight the world itself before allowing any harm to Madara, who has already seen so much in less than three decades of life.

For a long time the two of them stand there in silence and let the weight of Madara's past settle over them and Tobirama hopes until his throat closes with the feeling of it that he will be allowed to help carry that burden in the future.

With the mood ruined they eventually get dressed but Tobirama can’t find it in himself to be disappointed. He’s seen a different side of Madara than he had expected to be trusted with and that is more of a gift than he could express no matter the sadness of it. Covered again yet feeling raw in a way he can’t explain, Tobirama looks at the man standing proudly after all the things he’s been through and finds the words spilling over his lips before he can stop them.

“I love you.” He feels his eyes go wide when Madara turns to look at him in shock and more words spill out, a tidal wave against the reticence that holds his tongue on any other day. “Whatever this is between us, I don’t care. I love you, I want you, I would still love you if you had a hundred scars and I don’t care if you need me to not touch them or whatever. Just how you are is perfect and if anyone has ever told you any different just because of a stupid line on your neck that you _earned_ then–”

“Gods, stop, please.” Madara turns his head away a little and his cheeks are flushed like a summer burn.

“Oh, I…should I not have…?”

“Don’t. It’s fine. You’re embarrassing. It’s just a scar!”

Tobirama blinks, pauses, turns his own head to conceal the tiny smile growing at the corners of his mouth when he finally understands Madara's reaction. His concern is not as unappreciated as the interruption led him to assume, heart nearly stopping in his chest at the thought of impending rejection. Now he knows better.

“It’s a part of you and that makes it beautiful,” he murmurs just to watch the red color of his partner’s skin deepen until the man hides his face entirely this time. Embarrassment has never been Madara's friend.

“Just stop talking. You’re fine too if you need to hear it!”

Turning to press a kiss against messy damp hair, Tobirama whispers with gratitude rough in his voice, “It’s always nice to hear that.”

He knows this isn’t the last time they will speak of this or the last dark secret hiding underneath that permanent scowl he loves so much. Knows that they have many burdens between them and both of their baggage will be heavier some days than others. He knows that not everything will be perfect just because he finally knows for sure that Madara has opened his heart as surely as he holds Tobirama’s in the palm of his hands.

And it isn’t that none of that matters but that in this moment Tobirama knows that it is worth it. There will come a time when things are hard and he will fight through those times with bloody knuckles and gritted teeth because _Madara_ is worth it.

“I love you,” he whispers one more time.

“Yeah, yeah,” his partner grumbles. “I love you too…”

No precious stones or gold or riches could ever possibly have more value to him than those words whispered against the cotton of his t-shirt, honest and quiet and only for him.


End file.
